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253 Comments
- keeganzero, on 10/12/2007, -2/+123Both people who use AOL will be worried.
- mc7winkie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+67Good thing I search for all my gnarly animal porn on google.
- Lounger540, on 10/12/2007, -2/+61That, and the "Best viewed in FireFox." You mean AOL doesn't use their own browser?
- tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -2/+59Here's what TechCrunch has to say about this, "The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.
The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."
See: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/ - icetigaurus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+50Why would you have wanted to use AOL at any time ever?
- punkrockxtian, on 10/12/2007, -3/+51And this is why I won't be using AOL any time soon...
- pacificdave, on 10/12/2007, -3/+48This is why I wear a tin foil hat.... and you all thought I was nuts.
- jas168, on 10/12/2007, -1/+46Dugg just to expose some of the blatent security problems with the way we view the internet these days.
More people need to know why not to trust the non-existant "anonymity" of the internet. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+45Reason #23423972398723 to never use AOL.
- Switch22, on 10/12/2007, -12/+47DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
- DangerStevens, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34Just because the username isn't included doesn't make it anonymous. From a comment on the aol page:
12:09 by lando?: Hmm, i find it fascinating that user 545605's searches are "shore hills park mays landing nj", "frank william sindoni md", "ceramic ashtrays", "transfer money to china", and "capital gains on sale of house".
I wonder how Mr. Frank William in Sindoni, Maryland will feel about being included in your publicized data. - killerz298, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31Oh my!!! This is EXACTLY why the govt wants to get its hands on this data.
User: 336865 in the first txt file has some serious issues he needs to get help with!!
Here are a few goodies he searched for (almost daily!!):
sexy pregnant ladies naked
masturbation lessons
masturbation quizzes
child rape stories
child rape
preteen sex stories
illegal child porn
preteen nude pics
10 year old nude pics
child sex sites
10 year olds having sex
underground child porn sites
free rape games
learning masturbation
leeroy jenkins - greg418, on 10/12/2007, -3/+33I have mirrored the file. It is available here: http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
Setting up a BitTorrent torrent as we speak. Coral CDN will not cache this file, probably because of its size.
Cheers - tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30Very interesting find. I digg. Here's a link to the AOL research: http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months
- sizeof, on 10/12/2007, -7/+34THIS IS A HOAX - do you really believe they have 500,000 search users? ;-)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -14/+37RIDICULOUS. RIDICULOUS. RIDICULOUS.
- BitSlash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Well according to porn.dat, AOLers search for:
"futurama porn"
"girls brest"
and my favorite:
"x men naked pics" - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Elsewhere on the test samples:
"Frequency: 963
Query: how to masturbate" - tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -3/+24Also, if you recall, the government asked pretty much all the search engines for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. MSN and Yahoo! gave up the information but Google refused. Their records were subpoenaed. Google was praised by privacy experts for not giving in to the government's requests. Now, AOL is releasing these records to the public, not just the government. I do not see a difference in what was requested by the government earlier and what AOL is releasing.
What could Google and other search engines release if they were asked?
See: http://www.omninerd.com/2006/01/25/news/489?highlight=c4171#c4171 - scooter12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20Best one:
11467570 how to turn off my recent searches on aol 2006-05-28 18:44:42 - TheFoundry, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22Apparently Mr. Frank Williams of Sindoni, Maryland Does.
- dreampilot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20We have some AOL accts from a while back (10 years actually) for our staff to use on the road as an easy way to connect. We cancelled every account today. I'm sick and tired of what AOL has become. Time to vote with what hurts them most - money.
It was surprisingly easy to do so once I convinced them there was absolutely nothing they could offer to keep the accounts.
Internet commerce needs to be treated the same as any other kind - vote with your dollars. - georgelogy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18People who submit searches like that are beyond help. That's probably why they're still using AOL.
- trunkster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Number one search inquiry on AOL: retirement homes
- EGOvoruhk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20What the hell....
"18% gratuity added for parties of 6 or more" - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23Note that there are people down below in these comments posting mirrors of this data. Considering that the only reason this sensitive information got released is because AOL is filled with clueless retards who had absolutely no comprehension about what this info could be worth in the hands of certain shady individuals, I have one thing to say:
PLEASE, for the love of God, stop distributing this information any further! Instead, contact AOL and tell them what utter scum they are for jeopordizing so many people's privacy. I know people here are curious and want to read this stuff, but please just stop and THINK what could be in there, and why AOL was stupid and wrong to release it in the first place. You're just making it worse by making it more widely available. This is not a software security issue that needs to be pointed out. This is people's PRIVACY. - laserman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT. period.
- turbowaffle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18Unfortunately, I can't keep other people from plugging my phone number, SSN, or any other personal data into a search engine. (Say, if I were to go into a job interview and someone used a search engine to do some background checking)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19There is no such thing as anonymity on the internet. All it takes is a little investigating.
But what the heck do I care, AOL sucks and I've never used them :D - maiku00, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20this is ***** insane... i mean, wow... what the ***** aol?
- Urgo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Still downloading the collection but here is the README:
500k User Session Collection
----------------------------------------------
This collection is distributed for NON-COMMERCIAL RESEARCH USE ONLY.
Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Brief description:
This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.
The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged.
The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other types of search research.
The data set includes {AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL}.
AnonID - an anonymous user ID number.
Query - the query issued by the user, case shifted with
most punctuation removed.
QueryTime - the time at which the query was submitted for search.
ItemRank - if the user clicked on a search result, the rank of the
item on which they clicked is listed.
ClickURL - if the user clicked on a search result, the domain portion of
the URL in the clicked result is listed.
Each line in the data represents one of two types of events:
1. A query that was NOT followed by the user clicking on a result item.
2. A click through on an item in the result list returned from a query.
In the first case (query only) there is data in only the first three columns/fields -- namely AnonID, Query, and QueryTime (see above).
In the second case (click through), there is data in all five columns. For click through events, the query that preceded the click through is included. Note that if a user clicked on more than one result in the list returned from a single query, there will be TWO lines in the data to represent the two events. Also note that if the user requested the next "page" or results for some query, this appears as a subsequent identical query with a later time stamp.
CAVEAT EMPTOR -- SEXUALLY EXPLICIT DATA! Please be aware that these queries are not filtered to remove any content. Pornography is prevalent on the Web and unfiltered search engine logs contain queries by users who are looking for pornographic material. There are queries in this collection that use SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. This collection of data is intended for use by mature adults who are not easily offended by the use of pornographic search terms. If you are offended by sexually explicit language you should not read through this data. Also be aware that in some states it may be illegal to expose a minor to this data. Please understand that the data represents REAL WORLD USERS, un-edited and randomly sampled, and that AOL is not the author of this data.
Basic Collection Statistics
Dates:
01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006
Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for "next page" of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID's
Please reference the following publication when using this collection:
G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, "A Picture of Search" The First
International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June,
2006.
Copyright (2006) AOL - insomniac8400, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15part of the top 1000 questions.
"how to cancel aol"
LOL. - chkMINUS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17Google cache: http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:2Qvd2z9VbuIJ:research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php%3Fn%3DResearch.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
- JustBen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Spare a thought for the lawyers! Somewhere in AOL land is a legal team currently in need of a good cardiac surgeon.
- dhuck, on 10/12/2007, -7/+20badger badger badger?
- mrhahn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Who knew AOL had a sense of humour?
- AeonTorpor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13HAHA, best part from a mirror site, linked to in the Techcrunch Article.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/
http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
"Please mirror this file, and send me an Internet down the tubes by dialing greg@poly9.com so that I can include your link here."
AOL: "Yep, we're still for noobs." - JWood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I'm kind of sensing the downfall of AOL. Can't wait for that to happen.
- paragonconcept, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16its not like anyone who reads digg uses AOL - so who cares.... these people will never know their info was ever released ......
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16And who still uses AOL, again?
- tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14The data google released is from web pages, not search queries.
- bcwill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Here is the direct link to the download [439 MB]:
http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.Research?action=downloadman&upname=500kusers.tgz - shitthisfook, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Dumbest thing they've ever done for sure.
Also, this is the BEST SEARCH ENGINE YOU CAN ASK FOR right now. You can learn many keyword secrets that you would NEVER know about otherwise. Everyone has secret search techniques and words, and this file just puts them right out in the open.
This file makes me cry. Because I know that deep down in Google's dark labs, they have their own file where I searched my own name (some time ago) and some naughty things. =(
When the government seizes those records... =( - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12sadly, there are still many computer illiterate people out there that do.
at my old job, i encountered people that were dumb enough to think that AOL was the only internet provider in existance...talk about living under a rock - ActiveMatx, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13so what... how long did it take you to cancel the accounts? 6..... no 7.... hours?
- gd007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10this is aol's way to get back to the people who cancelled their service.
- tomi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Ironic.
- tangledweb, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Wow.
There is at least one person in the data who looks to be easily identifiable and looks like both a high school teacher and pedophile. I am sure there are other reasons that set of searches might be made from the one AOL screen name, but guilty or innocent, I would not like to be that guy.
http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/07/the-utter-stupidity-of-aol-is-staggering/ - vitaminbmeister, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10not from google, they already fought the law about this and won
- LexisNexis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12You can easily piece together who they are if they searched for things in their hometown, or people's names.
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